


nora perez, parttime psychopomp

by tamsinb



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Baltimore Crabs (Blaseball Team), Gen, Orange Slices, POV Second Person, Season 10 Day X, i think grim reapers are cute ok judge me, incinerated player cameos, oops the wiki made me get some facts wrong but i fixed it sorry about the bonk jokes erasure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27615844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamsinb/pseuds/tamsinb
Summary: Nora Perez was a player for the Baltimore Crabs. On Day 25 of Season 2 of Internet League Blaseball, she became the fifth player ever to be incinerated.This is a story about what happens after that.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	nora perez, parttime psychopomp

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so to preamble this one a little bit: the Crabs were discussing some of our characters that didn't have any lore, mainly Nora Perez, our first teammate to be incinerated, who was a bit of a blank slate. I had been thinking about an anime from 2000 and so I said "hey what if she was a grim reaper" as a joke but everyone said "that's a cool idea you should write that" and so that's where this came from. And then it sat around for a little bit until I figured I should put it here. Anyway. Hope you enjoy!

It was a small comfort, you thought as you walked, to be able to name with exactitude the manner of your death. Further comfort still for there to be a precedent: four prior instances, each alike in circumstance, leaving no ambiguity to the manner of your death. You were minding your own business. An umpire’s eyes turned white. And now you’re here. A long stretch of nothing, faded in after a certain distance as though your eyes could only penetrate so far. A small indent in the path, lined vaguely by dry, grasping trees. You follow it onward, and as you do you try to set your thoughts in order, find the missing action linking prelude and consequence. Your musings lead you no closer to comprehending the moment of your death, and before you grasp it you meet a strange figure in the road.

oh hey nora  
what's up

A monumental white squid appears ahead of you. You pause. Not quite what you’d been expecting from your post-life.

“You know my name?”

yeah of course  
came here to get you  
uh got lost though  
hungry now too

“How did you get lost? There’s a path.”

huh? what path  
anyway gotta get you back

“Back where?”

to the hall  
gonna be a lot more coming  
no time to waste

The squid makes a motion with its keel that you interpret as beckoning. You step forward and it wraps the dactylus of both its largest tentacles around you, carrying you close above the end of its funnel groove. It takes off quickly in precisely the wrong direction.

“Isn’t this the wrong way?”

what do you mean

“The path leads that way.”

huh? oh  
you may be right  
my bad

“I thought cephalopods were supposed to be smart.”

don't know what that is  
i'm the monitor

“I’m Nora. Nice to meet you.” You do your best to guide it down the path, and after a bit it seems to internalize the direction and you stop having to direct it as often.

you're pretty good at this  
you got a job?

“Used to. Just part time stuff to get me through grad school. But I guess I don’t anymore.”

wanna take over for me  
guiding the newly dead and all  
it's pretty tiring stuff  
i need a break  
permanently

You consider it for a moment, but not a very long moment. “That sounds okay.”

ok cool  
welcome to the psychopomping business

* * *

You had heard somewhere once that the first body buried in a graveyard becomes the place’s guardian spirit. You weren’t the first, missed that dubious honor by a handful of weeks, but you still feel like the role has fallen to you somehow. Perhaps just because you were the one available. Which is how it always seemed to go for you.

You quietly step out of lockstep with the other residents of the hall. Many more of them now. Most of which were guided here by you. Some found it on their own first, which spared you the long walk. You pull on your cloak and the tall, crooked hat. The outfit the squid had told you went along with the position. You were kind of partial to it. Striking and more than a little spooky. Lended a bit of gravitas to the affair.

Another one due today. It had been a while, not that time meant much around here. Less a passage and more a weight. You feel heavy under the burden of so many souls not brought before you, and you shrug it off as you make your way down to the place you know the new one will land.

Every soul has a path in front of it. The same holds true back on the mortal plane you imagine, but it was only upon arriving here that you found yourself with the ability to perceive it. Your role, then, is to see the newly arisen path, follow it backwards in time to find the new arrival, and guide them to the place they will rest. And receive peanuts. You weren’t really sure about that part, but then again it wasn’t your domain.

You hold a lantern down by your side, hand emerging from under your cloak. You have to hold it out at an angle and it plays hell on the tendons on the outside of your wrist. You bring an arm around to rub it and wish not for the first time that you could've ditched this when you died. Oh well. You'll see if you can scrounge up some ice later.

You stop. This is the place. A body falls from the sky and lands in a twitching heap in front of you. It wears a Crabs uniform.

“Fuckin. Shit!!!” yells the body, continuing to spasm long after its impact. “Didn’t think that fuckin ump would actually fuckin do it…”

“Hello. Welcome to the afterlife. I will guide you to your rest.”

The body looks up at you. “What’s with the fucking cringe ass hat.”

You grimace and self-consciously finger the hem of your cloak. Wait a minute. You know that shit-eating grin from somewhere.

“Oh my god Tillman Fucking Henderson they finally killed you.”

Tillman dusts himself off and stands up. Then he takes a good look at you. “Haha wait a second, Nora?”

“Yes. It’s me.”

“Holy fucking shit. I mean you were never much of a style icon when you weren’t fucking dead but. Hey, everyone down here dress as lame as you? Cause, uh, thanks but no thanks.”

You close your eyes briefly, once, then turn around and start back towards the hall at a brisk pace.

“H- Hey hold the fuck on Nora!! Are you gonna fucking leave me here?!”

“Yes,” you say, then you sigh. “No. Come on, Tillman.”

You have a job to do, after all. And you’re at least sort of good at it. No way this one or any other will get in the way of that.

You wait for a minute, and Tillman does not follow. You turn back around. He is struggling to stand on his own. A fairly normal proceeding, it takes some time for your body to adjust to its new modalities. You return to him. Somehow you had thought he would be unaffected by this place. You offer him your arm with a smirk you try desperately to turn into a smile.

“Like I fuckin need  _ YOUR _ help,” he says, but he takes it anyway.

“It should not be long until we arrive,” you say, to no response. Just the sound of labored breathing. But it gradually abates and soon Tillman is walking under mostly his own power. He pushes away from you before you would have said he is ready, but you allow him to stand alone anyway.

“So uh,” he says after a while. “I’m really dead, huh?”

“Yes. Absolutely and irrevocably.”

“Huh. I was sure all I’d have to do was just dodge and like.  _ NOT _ die.”

“A foolproof plan.”

“Hey so what’s with this whole  _ THING? _ Like, the hat and the lantern and guiding me and shit. Weren’t you supposed to be some kind of doctor?”

“Marine Biologist,” you correct, making a doomed effort to keep your face grimreaper-placid.

“And now you’re cosplaying that dude from Scream.” You do not respond. “You know, the one that  _ KILLS _ people and stuff.”

“I’m just dressing the part. The Monitor asked me to help it. And being dead, there was not much better to do.”

“Who the fuck is that.”

“You’ll meet it soon enough. Maybe. It’s a bit… flighty.”

“Huh.” A long pause, then: “Hey. Wait. If you’re here, then… is Combs?”

“Combs Duende is here as well, yes. I guided them myself.”

“Did they. Did they hear the song I wrote.”

You lead Tillman around a turn and cast your light down onto the trench. “Why don’t you ask them yourself? We’re here.”

* * *

When the monitor asks you to prepare for something it won’t adequately explain that is apparently just over the horizon, you have approximately three ideas for what this could mean. One of them is right. In this land of death only two events mark the passage of time: gain and loss. Gain far more frequent, but having slowed down to near match its partner loss. Only a handful of gains since...  _ him. _ And no losses since Jaylen so crudely forced from her time at rest.

No, wait, that’s right, you remember, one more. Not so long ago, possibly, a gain and loss in tandem: losing Tillman (his loss a gain) and gaining Jaylen (again a loss). You play with words in your head until you start to get a bit dizzy. When you retrieved Jaylen she let herself be led, almost docile, no not that  _ distracted, _ and you’d felt yourself tempted to ask what her mind was on. You’d wanted to ask as well if she remembered you, being one of the few people to make it in before you. And you’d wanted to thank her for getting rid of Tillman. But you do none of these and stick to your script of the guided tour through hell. It demands a certain decorum of you. You rise to the occasion.

When the time arrives you are carried up to  _ wherever _ along with the let’s-call-them-active players. Not so hard to figure out a third option besides gain and loss. The same one given you when you were above: to Play Ball. Of course, the ominous blue line under a selection of their names had been the most obvious clue, leaving question mainly to the circumstance. (Among the denizens your money had been on the formation of an expansion team. The being wrong hurts more than the monetary loss - and it would even if currency had meaning here.)

You hadn’t been in the top forteen, or even close, really. It hurt less than you expected it to, and that realization carried over to realizing that you felt strangely cozy in this vaporous world, your own small niche carved out of help and care and guidance. (The only part that really stung was watching Tillman pass you.)

You hadn’t been in the top forteen and so when the monitor approached you it was a surprise.

hey nora  
working hard or hardly working  
am i right

“Not much to do these days,” you answered.

yeah  
anyway need your help

“What’s up.”

well blaseball is thirsty work  
people need drinks  
people need snacks  
and drinks and snacks need carried

“Yeah I can handle that. You too lazy?”

not this time  
got a special snack lined up for me

“Sounds good,” you say, not wanting to waste the brain power trying to figure out what it meant.

When the appointed time arrived the monitor gathered those appointed, and you, and you were transported some direction that was vaguely upwards by a sickly blue light. You found yourself in a place that seemed even more like hell than the place you’d been. Everyone around you found themselves in pristine, game-ready versions of the Null Team jersey, colors slightly off and logo replaced by a squid, the monitor’s own image. The Hall Stars. You wince.

You look down and you’re wearing the uniform too, with the addition of a rather slick-looking dugout jacket. You pull at the hem. Somehow you miss the total coverage of your cloak, the way you could almost curl up inside of it. And a regular hat on your head feels far too constricting now. You try to fix your hair under it. It doesn’t work.

* * *

Boyfriend thanks you with a gracious smile as you take the water around. Dom and Randy Weed grasp at cups almost as fast as you can produce them, downing their contents rapaciously, the cottonmouth already setting in. Kiki Familia gives a resounding ‘nya~!’. And you aren’t quite sure what to do with Sebastian Sunshine but he seems a little hot so you just kind of throw it on him? And he gives you a thumbs up in return, so you guess you did the right thing. You shake out your wrist. Starting to twinge from all the dispensing and carrying of water. Great, exactly what you need right now.

hey nora  
over here

The monitor calls you from a place over in the sidelines. You shrug and follow, not having seen the being since the game began.

we’re getting creamed out there

You look up at the scoreboard and you’re honestly not sure how to read the game at this point. The two bars are in roughly the same place, and a mess of blessings and curses decorate both sides. But if the monitor says so then it must be true.

hey you’ve got weird eyes sometimes  
any idea how this ends

You scrutinize the field and watch as divots start to form under your gaze. They form and become paths and for a moment it’s clear which ones belong to who but soon they all cross over and intermesh and you’re staring at a nonsense blob of futures and pasts and destinies and failures and a faint ringing sensation starts to emanate from the crown of your brow directly between your eyes and you reach for the hem of your cloak but it’s not there so you ball your fists up inside the sleeves of your jacket and squirm for a bit until you can calm your breathing down.

gonna take that as a no  
in which case  
time to break out our secret weapon

“Oh yeah? What did you have in mind?”

A sheen crosses past the eyes of the monitor.

orange slices

“Orange slices?”

exactly  
Boss let me watch some old splorts movies  
kids in those loved orange slices  
gotta get some

“Sorry to burst your bubble,” you say, “but there’s nothing like that up here. I’ve just been passing out water from a couple of coolers I found stashed in the back of the dugout.”

oh  
ok leave it to me

The monitor gestures at you to step back and once you do it sets its primary feeding tentacles across the ground, bending them to touch at the tips and form a circle on the ground. With its remaining arms it traces out patterns too fast for sight and too many at once for you to follow. As the tips of the arms travel they begin to deposit blue flame in the air and you begin to realize you’re seeing the construction of a sigil and then all too fast it ends and you’re left looking at the monitor cradling a modest heap of oranges.

should be enough to get you started  
think you can handle it?

“Hm,” you wonder, and then you say, “shouldn’t be that hard.” Which surprises you, but you realize that you do somehow have the sigil’s pattern living in your head somewhere and you make a circle in your hand and watch it and your eye traces out that same pattern and blue flame dances in your hand. A small nectarine appears inside of it.

it’s so nice to have good help

“Hey can you teach me how to make more stuff? Maybe something a bit more… useful?”

some other time  
i gotta run  
there's a snack that needs cronching

* * *

Whether by the help of the orange slices or by some divine precedent, the Hall Stars emerge victorious, and the Peanut is Cronched. Peace reigns. Prosperity flowers. Sebastian Telephone descends back down (you make a mental note to collect him later), and Scrap Murphy takes his place. Scrap was the first you guided, and he plays with the same meekness that had made him a great trial run for your new place in the (after)world.

You descend and the others do not and you ask the monitor why and it gives no answer. You don your cloak and hat to bring Seb back. And as you set out to do your job for the first time it occurs to you to present whatever ears listen to your thoughts with the private wish that you never have to do this again.


End file.
